Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 15th Sep 2003 20:37 UTC
Today we feature a very interesting interview with Havoc Pennington. Havoc works for Red Hat, he is heading the desktop team, while he is well known also for his major contributions to GNOME, his GTK+ programming book, plus the freedesktop.org initiative which aims to standardize the X11 desktop environments. In the following interview we discuss about the changes inside Red Hat, Xouvert, freedesktop.org and Gnome's future, and how Linux, in general, is doing in the desktop market.
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>Using the GPU to composite is reasonable, that is true, but things
> start going downhill once you realise that you have to shunt a
> framebuffer down the AGP bus for every window you want to
> composite. Moreover, you have to keep a framebuffer-sized chunk
> of memory for each window, which very rapidly can cripple a system
> with a limited amount of memory. It is for this reason that OSX does
> not favour serious users who like to keep many windows open at the
> same time.
How many windows do I need to have open before I can feel serious about my computing? I've often suspected there was something wrong with my demeanor as I sat in front of the machine.
I accept the argument that graphics acceleration of the desktop requires better and more expensive hardware, and will not necessarily be desired by most of the world. I wouldn't worry though. Even if the U.S. market favored such acceleration, if the rest of the world didn't want to follow they would just persue another Linux distribution.
Even Mac OS X does not require acceleration. iBooks don't have a supported graphics chip, so fall back to software rendering.
But the argument that using hardware acceleration will hurt system performance is just plain wrong. You can run CPU monitor on a Mac and watch the load just drop away from the processors when Quartz Extreme is enabled. Are you that concerned that the AGP bus will have traffic on it? That's what it's there for. How will your system be faster with a bottlenecked processor and a quiet AGP?
Are you are saying there is a memory penalty somewhere because without hardware acceleration your windows don't need frame buffers?